The Wisdom of (Cyborg) Crowds

Опубликовано 27 июля 2016, 1:14

The past decade has shown both the great strengths and great weaknesses of large scale, distributed crowd action. As we enter the next decade, how might we do better? This talk will take a wide-ranging, retrospective approach: examining the crowd in a variety of contexts from scaled funny cat production to large-scale political mobilization. It will also examine the intellectual history of the crowd, examining the arguments made by scholars in favor and against it. Based on this discussion, we will turn the possibility of cyborg-crowds -- automated systems of various kinds that are built with shaping and optimizing the behavior of crowds in mind. In particular, we will examine experiments into the use of swarms of realistic automated identities online to shape the topology of social networks on a large scale. The ethics, economics, and future prospects of doing so will be examined alongside the engineering challenges.